The Intersection of Innovation and Contemporary Living

Daily Archives: March 9, 2007

"Join us on March 23, 2007 for Under the Radar: "Why Office 2.0 Matters". We will showcase 32 emerging, disruptive technologies that are changing the office landscape in sectors such as organization, collaboration, tracking, publishing, communicating, personalizing, and syncing. From the industry experts and pundits to the company presentations and audience feedback, you will learn about the future of office 2.0 – its challenges and opportunities, from SMB and enterprise adoption to the monetization of servicesâ€

We are excited to be part of this event, hope you can make it. We are going to demo a slew of new features, including a fully revamped Builder application that will blow you away, and highlight several partnerships we are undertaking with other companies at the event in the quest to bring affordable and extendable web services to the mass market.

Like this:

â€œVentureBeat is relaunching their job board in combination with Read/WriteWeb and the Alarm:Clock (two leading Web 2.0 blogs)â€

This seems like a very good idea indeed. I like the idea of embedding job boards into blogs, but if the job boards are all point solutions then there is a basic management problem in syncing across multiple job boards.

BTW, in the event you didnâ€™t notice, I put up a job board in my sidebar using Jobcoin. Super easy to setup and free.

Like this:

I have a guy that works for Teqlo who does all of our design work, from our website to the application to the component UIs that we build. He’s really a talented designer, so I was excited to see that he had entered the blogosphere (quietly, I would add, I only found out when it showed up on my Teqlo technorati feed).

A reputation systems is vital for community building, and in Ebay’s case it is clearly the metadata that gives buyers/sellers a sense of ownership that translates into repeat usage. The rating system is proprietary, which in this case simply means that it is not portable to another system, and that is clearly a strategic asset for Ebay.

Performance ratings in a transaction system need to be detailed. The "A++++++" seller/buyer rating model that Ebay feedback 1.0 featured was, simply put, gamed to the edge of irrelevance. The raw number mattered because it ensured access to the market, but the fear of retaliatory feedback meant that it was pretty rare to get a negative feedback. Experienced buyers and sellers knew this and handicapped appropriately, but new Ebay users were abandoned by this system and it became something other than it was intended to be.

Reputation systems have to have arbitration processes that are effective and timely, a point that spurred the post I wrote.

Ebay was clearly taking this issue seriously last August and we can now see the fruits of that effort. Ebay Feedback 2.0 (link via DailyTech) is out and it addresses many of the concerns that Ebay’ers have with the experience that Ebay is providing.

While there is feedback withdrawal there still isn’t an effective arbitration process for dealing with comments that are retaliatory in nature and that needs to be addressed.

Finally, Ebay needs to set their feedback system FREE so that it can become one element in identity systems to establish trust. Imagine how much more effective identity systems would be if they could encapsulate reputation, as in "my name is Jeff Nolan, I work for Teqlo, my Ebay rating is x, I belong to these communities where I am level ‘I’ve climbed a cell tower’ on HowardForums, I am a Second Lifer" and have that data attached to my OpenID URI which can then expose it to relevant systems.